Louisiana’s Jindal basks in gubernatorial victory

MONROE, La. – When Bobby Jindal lost his first Louisiana governor’s race four years ago, some experts told him that white people here were not ready to elect a dark-skinned son of Indian immigrants.

On Tuesday, as he dashed across the state in a victory caravan following his historic landslide win Saturday, Louisiana’s Republican governor-elect had a message for his rural supporters: Thank you for proving the political wisdom wrong.

Jindal, 36 – who will become the first Indian-American governor of any state, the youngest current governor in the country and the first nonwhite to lead Louisiana since Reconstruction – refused to believe that his ethnicity was an obstacle to achieving his political dreams.

He essentially never stopped campaigning after his 2003 loss to Democratic Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, an election in which he failed to win over many of the white rural voters who should have loved his conservative positions.

Jindal was convinced that if voters got to know him, they would see him as a fellow native son from Baton Rouge, not a foreigner with an Ivy League degree.

So he made more than 70 trips to northern Louisiana cities such as Shreveport, and the devout Catholic seemingly attended Sunday mass at every small church in the state, even after he was elected to represent suburban New Orleans in Congress in 2004.

“In these small Louisiana towns, retail politics is very important,” Jindal said in an interview from his tour bus as he rode to Natchitoches. He always believed Blanco beat him simply because she was better known. “I don’t think there’s any substitute for staring someone in the eye and listening,” he said.

Jindal’s tireless tours of Louisiana, especially here in the conservative northern parishes that were considered the keys to his earlier defeat, impressed political observers, who said that by the time his rivals entered this year’s race, Jindal’s hard-earned backing in the rural stronghold was insurmountable.

“I have never seen anyone work so hard,” said Bernie Pinsonat, a Louisiana pollster and political consultant. “I had a local legislator tell me that he had to go to church more often, because Jindal had been to his church more times than he had.”

Jindal wound up winning all but four of Louisiana’s 64 parishes – nearly the entire state except New Orleans. It was an embarrassing defeat for Democrats, who were unable even to force Jindal into a runoff election. Under Louisiana’s open primary rules, a candidate who can secure more than half the total vote wins outright. Jindal received 54 percent, despite competing against 11 candidates.

Blanco opted not to seek re-election earlier this year after her response to Hurricane Katrina drew widespread criticism, and no prominent Democrat stepped in to challenge Jindal.

Piyush “Bobby” Jindal’s meteoric rise through the Republican Party ranks is already legend in Louisiana – as is his personal version of the American dream. His parents moved to Baton Rouge from India shortly before he was born so his mother could study nuclear physics at Louisiana State University. His father is a civil engineer.

At age 4, Jindal asked his teacher to refer to him henceforth as Bobby, after the character from ” The Brady Bunch.” His parents worried he was going through a phase but also obliged, and Jindal has been known as Bobby since. When he converted from Hinduism to Catholicism at age 18, he used Robert as his baptismal name.

At age 24, the Brown University and Oxford-educated wunderkind was named head of the Louisiana Department of Heath and Hospitals by then-Gov. Mike Foster, placing him in charge of a $4 billion budget and 13,000 employees, and on the political fast track.

Yet he learned in 2003 that his resume was not enough to be elected governor in Louisiana – and could even serve as a hindrance. Democrats ran ads criticizing the steep cuts Jindal had made as health chief and questioning whether the Ivy Leaguer was in touch with common folk. The ads worked.

Following his defeat, Jindal launched his statewide charm offensive.